


You Say It Best

by TriffidsandCuckoos



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Allusions to non-graphic violence, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Reactions to trauma, as far as Natasha can manage it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-07
Updated: 2012-12-07
Packaged: 2017-11-20 12:30:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/585448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TriffidsandCuckoos/pseuds/TriffidsandCuckoos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha is good at many things, but not comfort. Yet here she is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Say It Best

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shinobi93](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinobi93/gifts).



> Based on/inspired by the shower scene in the Bond movie _Casino Royale_. Title from Ronan Keating's 'When You Say Nothing At All'.

About six months after her life stopped making sense and she was relegated from assassin to babysitter (the amount of mortal peril hasn’t changed), Natasha finds herself for once residing in luxury outside of Avengers Tower. It’s a little disorienting, since leaving the tower usually means residence aboard trains through Bosnia or government-funded safehouses in Peru. They’re the conditions she’s used to – still better, in fact, than when her old masters wanted to make sure the recruits hadn’t gone soft.

Only this time she finds herself in a five-star hotel in Montenegro and not even for a mission. She isn’t Clint’s wife, or his secret mistress ( _whose secret?_ he’d smirk, whilst she decided how much truth she was permitting within this backstory, just before he pulled her back onto silken sheets and reminded her they only had the room for three hours). She is Natasha Romanoff, or Black Widow. She knows this because when she roams the hallways, uncomfortable remaining in the slice of rich European paradise that is her suite, she sees staff and guests alike duck out of her path.

This isn’t new. She intimidates people, and she refuses to give interviews that counteract this impression, regardless of whatever PR cry over. She doesn’t care, because she never has done – she leaves the showboating to Stark, the handshaking to Cap, the booming friendliness to Thor, and the inappropriate comments to Clint. Besides which, while she might be in search of company, she isn’t seeking out strangers.

It’s surprising, to be offered this luxury. Granted, Stark has money – more than enough, enough to make Natasha reflect on her childhood and send skittering memories of anti-West sentiment across her mind – and staying here had been his idea after the hell of a mission out there. (Hell for them, perhaps. Blood is nothing new to her.) Only the hotel’s manager had looked like he was going to pass out at the mere suggestion of taking payment, meaning that all this is for free. A gift from people who just witnessed carnage on the streets.

The Avengers normally deal in aliens, or megalomaniacs, or, one time, steam-powered dragons. Clone armies might have had higher-brain functions removed, but it seems that biological robots still scream; they still bleed.

This group had had the ability to reproduce by splitting themselves, which meant that you had to hit them faster than they could think. You had to take them out at speed.

It was a bloodbath and now her bathroom has real marble and real silk and bathrobes as thick as the carpet.

She can’t.

Instead, she’s out here, looking.

Door locks don’t mean much to her, regardless of the hotel’s star rating. She usually doesn’t break in out of politeness – Coulson has often told her how much he wishes Clint would pick up on that concept – but right now, she needs to be in this room, and knocking is unlikely to receive a response.

The bed is untouched, as is the minibar. But she sees the glasses thrown down on the windowsill, and that is enough for her to know she was right to come here.

Cautiously, she follows the sound of the shower. 

No need to worry about propriety. Bruce is a man who values his privacy, so even though this is his room alone, he would still have locked the bathroom door if there was something he didn’t want seen.

The door moves smoothly at the touch of her hand, swinging open to reveal a sight that wrenches at her black husk of an assassin’s heart.

Distantly, in her cold, detached self, she deduces that Bruce took the time and effort to carefully replace his lost shirt – each button and seam meticulously attended to – before he found himself here, curled in the shower, staring at the wall.

You had to kill a great deal of people, fast.

The Hulk fitted the bill perfectly.

Despite the pristine shirt - now soaked through, he’ll be shivering when he comes back to himself – his trousers are the same, and the water is doing nothing to wash away the blood soaked into it.

She pauses by the shower door, the only propriety allowed by its glass walls. 

He turns his head away, but doesn’t say no.

Natasha is not a woman given to comfort. Clint has had a few words to say about her sparring addiction, when he himself experiences reminders of the truth of the world in which they live. For every time she has allowed him to curl up with his head in her lap – always Clint’s problem, not the feeling nothing but rather feeling too much, her poor broken archer – there have been hundreds when they have no time for this, she has no time for this, and the choice is silent dismissal or cathartic violence.

However, Bruce is not a man you wish to provoke, and the man has been ignored far too many times (in favour of the monster).

She’s still in her uniform. That’s good, she thinks to herself, as she sinks to the tiles beside him. It needed a wash.

They say nothing. He knows that she’s here; she knows that he knows. There’s nothing to be said there.

“I thought about washing my hands,” he says after minutes have passed, distantly, almost dreamily, as if talking about a walk he took the other day. “No point though; it’s everywhere. Who cares about my hands?”

Still Natasha says nothing. She lets the whisper of the water fill the space after his words. Instead, she moves closer, pressing against Bruce’s side: no consolations or apologies, just a reminder that he is not alone. It’s better that way, she finds; words are hardly her strong suit, when there is no battle to be fought or target to be terminated.

A pause, and then he lets himself rest against her, head falling on her shoulder, fingers curling around her arm. Not for the first time, she sees him revert to childhood, escaping what the man has become.

She wishes she had a talent for words.

She wishes she was a caring person; a _nice_ person; the person Bruce needs to talk to. Right now, she is all she ever can be: a presence. Nothing substantial, just a fact.

Stark is probably already through his mini-bar and downstairs, smiling to hide it all. Hopefully he’s pulled Cap along – the last thing Rogers needs is to be left alone in a strange room thinking over the battle and wondering what life those puppets had. Perhaps she should have checked in on Clint, except she knows Coulson is here, and he’ll have a much better idea of whether this is Clint’s time to fight or fuck or mourn. 

Thor isn’t on Earth right now, and she has little interest in knowing what he would have thought of this.

“I’m sorry,” she hears herself murmur. She has no idea what she’s apologising for – the fight, the blood, the memories, the dreams, the Avengers, his fate – and in her defence, she doesn’t say the words often enough to know the full weight to put behind them. So many people can just throw them out, but when she does so, they fall flat. Comfort simply isn’t natural to her. Not unless it’s trickery.

Bruce makes her want to be genuine. 

He doesn’t tell her not to be, or berate her for falsely taking the blame. She supposes that’s because he knows as well as her how confused her phrase is.

Her hair clings to her; the water is hot, so hot that it steams, yet that makes no difference to the two of them. She can feel Bruce shivering against her. This day will haunt him for a long time to come; this day, and the many before it, and those that will inevitably come afterwards. And all she can do is sit here in silence and hold him.

Well, she knows the motions. The fact that she isn’t faking means that they feel like a performance, soaked in cynicism, every movement feeling rehearsed and obvious to an outsider; but this is all she can give him.

She tightens her arm around him; turns her head to brush a kiss against his wet hair. Then, following a mental directive that makes little sense logically, she takes his hand, and presses a kiss against it. 

(If I die, Barton, _she murmurs as the fever burns and drains her dry, before the exhaustion steals the end of her threat._

 _Suddenly soft, he laughs, and as she sinks once more into dreams, she thinks she imagines lips against her fingers; thinks that Clint is risking infection for nothing._ )

Natasha is content to wait. She certainly has no interest in the goings-on downstairs, and besides which, to leave Bruce like this would be a cruelty even she isn’t capable of.

It’s a good hotel; it earns its money; the water stays hot. Warm enough for both of them.

For once, she lets go of her sense of time, and lets herself drift. 

At one point, Bruce says something against her shoulder.

“You’re better at this than you think.”

She doesn’t know what to say to that. So she says nothing at all.


End file.
